But why a
jaybird?Because his initials were, L.
B.”Jay”? – and his wife’s name was Lady-“Bird”?

Probably not.
Early examples of the idiom, “naked as a
jaybird” suggest that the idiom originally referred to the nakedness of freshly
hatched birds.

Unfledged Birds

“As naked as
a Jaybird” is an American idiom that means essentially the same as, “as naked
as a newborn baby.”But, whereas the
imagery of a naked baby is straightforward and literal, the connection between
nudity and birds is less obvious.Jaybirds never wear clothes, although their feathers keep them from
appearing completely naked.

Christine
Ammer, the editor of the American
Heritage Dictionary of Idioms and Cool
Cats, Top Dogs and Other Beastly Expressions, speculated that the idiom
referred to the nearly featherless state of an unfledged Jay. Newly hatched perching birds (including
jays) have almost no down.Early examples of the idiom, and its British precursor, “naked as a robin” (also a perching bird), suggest that Christine Ammer’s instincts were correct.[iii]

The second
earliest example[iv]
of “naked as a robin” that I could find is from a debate about taxation and
payment of the national debt:

If Sir Thomas adhere to
his doctrine, and if that doctrine be acted upon, he will have the coat taken
off his back, and will be left as naked as a robin two
hours old; and I shall see him in a plight more wretched even than that
of any of those who are now, as he, I dare say, sincerely professes, objects of
his commiseration.

Another
turn-of-phrase from about the same time supports the freshly-hatched theory:

He spoke further, and from
behind a screen of dried reeds out creeped a diminutive creature with a huge
head, having the form of a misshapen human being – but black as ebony and, with
the exception of a sheepskin, round its loins, as naked
as a new hatched raven.

As early as 1822, unfledged birds of unspecified species were paragons of nakedness:

[A]fter having passed through a country diversified with hedges bare, ditches frozen over, woods as naked as an unfledged bird, with here and there a few of the feathered tribe hopping on the uninviting branches -- . . . we arrived safe at the mansion of Squire Potter.

“A Christmas Visit,” The Manchester Iris, Volume 1, Number 39, October 26, 1822, page 306 (Thank you Garson O'Toole for alerting me to this citation).The expression, “naked as an unfledged bird,” appears in print a couple more times; the latest in the 1870s.

Both American
and British writers of the period played variations on the newborn theme;
further supporting the notion: “naked as a new-born babe” (1839),[v]
“naked as a new doll” (1851),[vi]
“naked as a new-born devil” (1844),[vii]
“naked as a new-made mast” (1864).[viii]

Birds,
babies, dolls and devils were not the only things to be metaphorically naked.Poor people who can't afford clothes might also be naked:

If the constitutional
bounds in either case are overleaped, what assurance have the people that their
liberties and reserved rights may not be imperceptibly frittered away and
swallowed up by the Governments created originally for their protection, and
they stripped naked as a Danish boor or a Russian serf,
especially if the United States may tax them, and the States may tax them, when
neither tax is to be levied for either national or State purposes.

Gales & Seaton’s Register of Debates in
[the United States’] Congress, House of Representatives, September 20,
1837, page 689.

To me, no season of the
year is so disagreeable as the moment when a glaring spring sunshine makes one
pant after the shade and refreshment of verdure, while the branches are still as naked as an Irish beggar.

Catherine
Gore, Cecil, a Peer: a Sequel to Cecil,
or, The Adventure of a Coxcomb, London, T. and W. Boone, 1841, page 202.

Most of
these examples appear to be one-off turns of phrase, and not to have achieved
idiomatic status in their own right; only “naked as a jaybird” and “naked as a
robin” appeared regularly in print.

“Naked
as a robin” appears to have been a well-known British idiom throughout the 19th
century and throughout Britain.[ix]It was used in a magazine published in
London in the 1820s, and by writers from Surrey in Kent in 1851 and from Bradford
in Yorkshire in 1872.Even Stanley’s Dr. Livingstone (“Dr.
Livingstone, I presume”), who was from Scotland and spent much of his adult
life in Africa, used the expression in his journal in 1866.[x]

I could only
find only two examples of “naked as a jaybird” in print from before 1899; the second one, appropriately enough, is from a clothing advertisement from 1894:

The phrase appears regularly, if not frequently, after 1899. Perhaps its rise was influenced by the term "Jay" (bumpkin), which dates to the 1880s, and became increasingly common throughout the 1890s and into the early 1900s.

Bare Tailfeathers

An old
cowboy, critical of fakers and counterfeits, fashioned a modified version in
1893:

[I]f he ever ventures to show his contemptible
cranium within fifty miles of a decent cow camp, he will have his humbug
qualifications of cow-boy stripped from his poor worthless carcass so quickly
that he would feel like a jay bird with his tail
feathers gone.

Curiously,
the cowboy version of 1893 bears a striking similarity to an older – MUCH older
– line from a book first published in 1562; a book written by the man credited
with dozens of still common expressions; “haste makes waste,” “out of sight,
out of mind,” “two heads are better than one,” “have your cake and eat it too,”
and “do not look a gift horse in the mouth,” among others.

John Heywood was an
English writer who was born in Coventry in about 1497 and died in Belgium in
1866; he England to avoid the consequences of the Act of Uniformity against
Catholics in 1564. His Dialogue of the
Effectual Proverbs in the English Tongue Concerning Marriage contains the
following lines:

To discharge charge, that
necessarily grew,

There was no more water than the ship drew.

Such drifts drave he, from ill to worse and

Till he was as bare as a bird’s
arse.

John S.
Farmer, Editor, A Dialogue of the
Effectual Proverbs in the English Tongue Concerning Marriage by John
Heywood, London, Gibbings, 1906, Proverbs, Pt. II, Ch. VIII, page 89 (italics
in the original).[xi]

Picked (Plucked) Birds

Heywood’s
1562 version and the cowboy’s 1893 version, though similar, differ in that the
former implies that bird’s arses are naturally bare and the latter suggests a jaybird
missing tail feathers that might otherwise be there, if they hadn’t been
plucked.The cowboy’s version may be a
mash-up of “naked as a jaybird” with another naked idiom, “as naked as a picked
bird”:

There he was, six
miles from home, as naked as a picked bird and no way to get home without
creating a riot, except by waiting until it got dark.

In an ironic
twist born of an iconic twister, a “dead robin” might be as “naked as a picked
bird”:

A dead robin was picked up
on Lafayette Park.On one side the bird
was intact.On the other every feather
was gone.It was “naked as a picked
bird,” to use a familiar expression.

Julian
Curzon, The Great Cyclone at St. Louis
and East St. Louis, May 27, 1896, St. Louis, Cyclone Publishing Company,
1896, page

And, coming
full circle, a jaybird could be picked naked:

It would not only answer
as a great convenience, but would beautify and adorn that part of our town,
which, at present, looks shorn of all attraction and as
naked as a picked jaybird.

The Comet (Johnson City, Tennessee),
March 15, 1894, page 1.

The Moral of the Story

The moral of
Aesop’s fable of the Jay and the Peacock is that, “it is not only fine feathers
that make fine birds;” the suggestion being that the lowly Jay was putting on
airs by wearing his peacock feathers.But now that I think about it, perhaps he needed the peacock feathers
because he had been picked clean and was “as naked as a picked jaybird.”Have we been too hard on him for all these millennia.

This topic
has also been picked clean.The idiom, “naked
as a jaybird,” appears to be a shortened version of “naked as an unfledged Jay bird,” which was itself a longer version of “naked
as an unfledged bird.” The Brits followed a similar path using a robin instead. When “unfledged” flew the coop, the original meaning was obscured.Over time, the idiom was folded, spindled and
mutilated in various riffs on the original theme, including “picked
birds” and “missing tail feathers.”In
the end, however, a form of the idiom went full-circle, back to
a 450-year old expression about bare bird bottoms; whether that expression was
ever idiomatic or not, is another question.

[iv]
The earliest example of “naked as a robin” I could find was also from Cobbett’s
Weekly Register (Volume 42, Number 1, April 6, 1822): No; I won’t take the
lease! You sha’nt give up the lease.I’ll make you pay your rent; or, “as G—d’smy savior” I’ll strip
you as naked as a robin!

[ix] Several
discussions online suggest that “naked as a robin” was from Shropshire. Those
suggestions may have been influenced by its inclusion in Charlotte Sophia
Burne’s, Shropshire FolkLore, a Sheaf of
Gleanings, London, Truebner & Co., 1886, page 595.

[x]
David Livingston, The Last Journals of
David Livingstone in Central Africa Until His death, London, John Murray,
1874, Volume 1, Page 65, Journal entry dated June 29, 1866.

[xi]
The volume published in 1906 was a reprint of an 1867 collated reprint of the
1562 and 1566 editions of the book.